The Winning of the West, Volume Four by Theodore Roosevelt
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Theodore Roosevelt >> The Winning of the West, Volume Four
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23 PRESIDENTIAL EDITION
THE WINNING OF THE WEST
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
VOLUME FOUR
LOUISIANA AND THE NORTHWEST
1791-1807
WITH MAP
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED, WITH HIS PERMISSION
TO
FRANCIS PARKMAN
TO WHOM AMERICANS WHO FEEL A PRIDE IN THE PIONEER HISTORY OF THEIR
COUNTRY ARE SO GREATLY INDEBTED
PREFACE TO FOURTH VOLUME.
This volume covers the period which opened with the checkered but
finally successful war waged by the United States Government against the
Northwestern Indians, and closed with the acquisition and exploration of
the vast region that lay beyond the Mississippi. It was during this
period that the West rose to real power in the Union. The boundaries of
the old West were at last made certain, and the new West, the Far West,
the country between the Mississippi and the Pacific, was added to the
national domain. The steady stream of incoming settlers broadened and
deepened year by year; Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became states,
Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi territories. The population in the
newly settled regions increased with a rapidity hitherto unexampled; and
this rapidity, alike in growth of population and in territorial
expansion, gave the West full weight in the national councils.
The victorious campaigns of Wayne in the north, and the innumerable
obscure forays and reprisals of the Tennesseeans and Georgians in the
south, so cowed the Indians, that they all, north and south alike, made
peace; the first peace the border had known for fifty years. At the same
time the treaties of Jay and Pinckney gave us in fact the boundaries
which the peace of 1783 had only given us in name. The execution of
these treaties put an end in the north to the intrigues of the British,
who had stirred the Indians to hostility against the Americans; and in
the south to the far more treacherous intrigues of the Spaniards, who
showed astounding duplicity, and whose intrigues extended not only to
the Indians but also to the baser separatist leaders among the
Westerners themselves.
The cession of Louisiana followed. Its true history is to be found, not
in the doings of the diplomats who determined merely the terms upon
which it was made, but in the western growth of the people of the United
States from 1769 to 1803, which made it inevitable. The men who settled
and peopled the western wilderness were the men who won Louisiana; for
it was surrendered by France merely because it was impossible to hold it
against the American advance. Jefferson, through his agents at Paris,
asked only for New Orleans; but Napoleon thrust upon him the great West,
because Napoleon saw, what the American statesmen and diplomats did not
see, but what the Westerners felt; for he saw that no European power
could hold the country beyond the Mississippi when the Americans had
made good their foothold upon the hither bank.
It remained to explore the unknown land; and this task fell, not to mere
wild hunters, such as those who had first penetrated the wooded
wilderness beyond the Alleghanies, but to officers of the regular army,
who obeyed the orders of the National Government. Lewis, Clark, and Pike
were the pioneers in the exploration of the vast territory the United
States had just gained.
The names of the Indian fighters, the treaty-makers, the wilderness
wanderers, who took the lead in winning and exploring the West, are
memorable. More memorable still are the lives and deeds of the settler
folk for whom they fought and toiled; for the feats of the leaders were
rendered possible only by the lusty and vigorous growth of the young
commonwealths built up by the throng of westward-pushing pioneers. The
raw, strenuous, eager social life of these early dwellers on the western
waters must be studied before it is possible to understand the
conditions that determined the continual westward extension of the
frontier. Tennessee, during the years immediately preceding her
admission to statehood, is especially well worth study, both as a
typical frontier community, and because of the opportunity afforded to
examine in detail the causes and course of the Indian wars.
In this volume I have made use of the material to which reference was
made in the first; beside the American State Papers, I have drawn on the
Canadian Archives, the Draper Collection, including especially the
papers from the Spanish archives, the Robertson MSS., and the Clay MSS.
for hitherto unused matter. I have derived much assistance from the
various studies and monographs on special phases of Western history; I
refer to each in its proper place. I regret that Mr. Stephen B. Weeks'
valuable study of the Martin family did not appear in time for me to use
it while writing about the little state of Franklin, in my third volume.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, LONG ISLAND,
_May_, 1896.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. ST. CLAIR'S DEFEAT, 1791
II. MAD ANTHONY WAYNE; AND THE FIGHT OF THE FALLEN TIMBERS, 1792-1795
III. TENNESSEE BECOMES A STATE, 1791-1796
IV. INTRIGUES AND LAND SPECULATIONS--THE TREATIES OF JAY AND PINCKNEY,
1793-1797.
V. THE MEN OF THE WESTERN WATERS, 1798-1802
VI. THE PURCHASE OF LOUISIANA; AND BURR'S CONSPIRACY, 1803-1807
VII. THE EXPLORERS OF THE FAR WEST, 1804-1807.
APPENDIX
INDEX
[Illustration: Map Showing the First Explorations of the Great West.
Based on a map by G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London.]
THE WINNING OF THE WEST.
CHAPTER I.
ST. CLAIR'S DEFEAT, 1791.
The Westward March of the Backwoodsman.
The backwoods folk, the stark hunters and tree-fellers, and the war-worn
regulars who fought beside them in the forest, pushed ever westward the
frontier of the Republic. Year after year each group of rough settlers
and rough soldiers wrought its part in the great epic of wilderness
conquest.
The people that for one or more generations finds its allotted task in
the conquest of a continent, has before it the possibility of splendid
victory, and the certainty of incredible toil, suffering, and hardship.
The opportunity is great indeed; but the chance of disaster is even
greater. Success is for a mighty race, in its vigorous and masterful
prime. It is an opportunity such as is offered to an army by a struggle
against a powerful foe; only by great effort can defeat be avoided, but
triumph means lasting honor and renown.
As it is in the battle, so it is in the infinitely greater contests
where the fields of fight are continents, and the ages form the measure
of time. In actual life the victors win in spite of brutal blunders and
repeated checks.
The Grimness and Harshness of Frontier Life.
Watched nearby, while the fight stamps to and fro, the doers and the
deeds stand out naked and ugly. We see all too clearly the blood and
sweat, the craft and dunning and blind luck, the raw cruelty and
stupidity, the shortcomings of heart and hand, the mad abuse of victory.
Strands of meanness and cowardice are everywhere shot through the warp
of lofty and generous daring. There are failures bitter and shameful
side by side with feats of triumphant prowess. Of those who venture in
the contest some achieve success; others strive feebly and fail ignobly.
Only a Mighty Race Fit for the Trial.
If a race is weak, if it is lacking in the physical and moral traits
which go to the makeup of a conquering people, it cannot succeed. For
three hundred years the Portuguese possessed footholds in South Africa;
but they left to the English and Dutch the task of building free
communities able to hold in fact as well as in name the country south of
the Zambesi. Temperate South America is as fertile and healthy for the
white man as temperate North America, and is so much less in extent as
to offer a far simpler problem of conquest and settlement; yet the
Spaniard, who came to the Plata two centuries before the American
backwoodsman reached the Mississippi, scarcely made as much progress in
a decade as his northern rival did in a year.
The task must be given the race just at the time when it is ready for
the undertaking. The whole future of the world would have been changed
had the period of trans-oceanic expansion among the nations of Europe
begun at a time when the Scandinavians or Germans were foremost in
sea-trade and sea-war; if it had begun when the fleets of the Norsemen
at the threatened all coasts, or when the Hanseatic league was in its
prime.
No race can Succeed Save at the Right Moment.
But in the actual event the days of Scandinavian supremacy at sea
resulted in no spread of the Scandinavian tongue or culture; and the
temporary maritime prosperity of the North German cities bore no
permanent fruit of conquest for the German people. The only nations that
profited by the expansion beyond the seas, and that built up in alien
continents vast commonwealths with the law, the language, the creed, and
the culture, no less than the blood, of the parent stocks, were those
that during the centuries of expansion, possessed power on the
ocean,--Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and, above all, England.
Interest of the Race and the Individual Opposed.
Even a strong race, in its prime, and given the task at the right
moment, usually fails to perform it; for at the moment the immense
importance of the opportunity is hardly ever understood, while the
selfish interests of the individual and the generation are opposed to
the interest of the race as a whole. Only the most far-seeing and
high-minded statesmen can grasp the real weight, from the
race-standpoint, of the possibilities which to the men of their day seem
so trivial. The conquest and settlement rarely take place save under
seldom-occurring conditions which happen to bring about identity of
interest between the individual and the race. Dutch seamen knew the
coasts of Australia and New Zealand generations before they were settled
by the English, and had the people of Holland willed to take possession
of them, the Dutch would now be one of the leading races of mankind; but
they preferred the immediate gains to be derived from the ownership of
the trade with the Spice Islands; and so for the unimportant
over-lordship of a few patches of tropical soil, they bartered the
chance of building a giant Dutch Republic in the South Seas. Had the
Swedish successors of Gustavus Adolphus devoted their energies to
colonization in America, instead of squabbling with Slavs and Germans
for one or two wretched Baltic provinces, they could undoubtedly have
built up in the new world a Sweden tenfold greater than that in the old.
If France had sent to her possessions in America as many colonists as
she sent soldiers to war for petty townships in Germany and Italy, the
French would now be masters of half the territory north of the Rio
Grande. England alone, because of a combination of causes, was able to
use aright the chances given her for the conquest and settlement of the
world's waste spaces; and in consequence the English-speaking peoples
now have before them a future more important than that of all the
continental European peoples combined.
Each Race Indifferent to its Own Future.
It is natural that most nations should be thus blind to the
possibilities of the future. Few indeed are the men who can look a score
of years into the future, and fewer still those who will make great
sacrifices for the real, not the fancied, good of their children's
children; but in questions of race supremacy the look-ahead should be
for centuries rather than decades, and the self-sacrifice of the
individual must be for the good not of the next generation but perchance
of the fourth or fifth in line of descent. The Frenchman and the
Hollander of the seventeenth century could not even dimly see the
possibilities that loomed vast and vague in the colonization of America
and Australia; they did not have, and it was hardly possible that they
should have, the remotest idea that it would be well for them to
surrender, one the glory gained by his German conquests, the other the
riches reaped from his East Indian trade, in order that three hundred
years later huge unknown continents should be filled with French and
Dutch commonwealths. No nation, taken as a whole, can ever see so far
into the future; no nation, even if it could see such a future, would
ever sacrifice so much to win it. Hitherto each race in turn has
expanded only because the interests of a certain number of individuals
of many succeeding generations have made them active and vigorous agents
in the work of expansion.
This Indifference as Marked in New as in Old Communities.
This indifference on the part of individuals to the growth of the race
is often nearly as marked in new as in old communities, although the
very existence of these new communities depends upon that growth. It is
strange to see now the new settlers in the new land tend to turn their
faces, not towards the world before them, but towards the world they
have left behind. Many of them, perhaps most, wish rather to take parts
in the struggles of the old civilized powers, than to do their share in
laying the obscure but gigantic foundations of the empires of the
future. The New Englander who was not personally interested in the lands
beyond the Alleghanies often felt indifferent or hostile to the growth
of the trans-montane America; and in their turn these over-mountain men,
these Kentuckians and Tennesseans, were concerned to obtain a port at
the mouth of the Mississippi rather than the right to move westward to
the Pacific. There were more men in the new communities than in the old
who saw, however imperfectly, the grandeur of the opportunity and of the
race-destiny: but there were always very many who did their share in
working out their destiny grudgingly and under protest.
The Race Grows because its Interests Happen to be Identical with
those of the Individual.
The race as a whole, in its old homes and its new, learns the lesson
with such difficulty that it can scarcely be said to be learnt at all
until success or interests failure has done away with the need of
learning it. But in the case of our own people it has fortunately
happened that the concurrence of the interests of the individual and of
the whole organism has been normal throughout most of its history.
The United States and Great Britain in 1791.
The attitude of the United States and Great Britain, as they faced one
another in the western wilderness at the beginning of the year 1791, is
but another illustration of the truth of this fact. The British held the
lake posts, and more or less actively supported the Indians in their
efforts to bar the Americans from the Northwest. Nominally, they held
the posts because the Americans had themselves left unfulfilled some of
the conditions of the treaty of peace; but this was felt not to be the
real reason, and the Americans loudly protested that their conduct was
due to sheer hatred of the young Republic. The explanation was simpler.
The British had no far-reaching design to prevent the spread and growth
of the English-speaking people on the American continent. They cared
nothing, one way or the other, for that spread and growth, and it is
unlikely that they wasted a moment's thought on the ultimate future of
the race. All that they desired was to preserve the very valuable
fur-trade of the region round the Great Lakes for their own benefit.
They were acting from the motives of self-interest that usually control
nations; and it never entered their heads to balance against these
immediate interests the future of a nation many of whose members were to
them mere foreigners.
Reluctance of the Americans to Enter into War with the Indians.
The majority of the Americans, on their side, were exceedingly loth to
enter into aggressive war with the Indians: but were reluctantly forced
into the contest by the necessity of supporting the backwoodsmen. The
frontier was pushed westward, not because the leading statesmen of
America, or the bulk of the American people, foresaw the continental
greatness of this country or strove for such greatness; but because the
bordermen of the West, and the adventurous land-speculators of the East,
were personally interested in acquiring new territory, and because,
against their will, the governmental representatives of the nation were
finally forced to make the interests of the Westerners their own. The
people of the seaboard, the leaders of opinion in the coast towns and
old-settled districts, were inclined to look eastward, rather than
westward. They were interested in the quarrels of the old-world nations;
they were immediately concerned in the rights of the fisheries they
jealously shared with England, or the trade they sought to secure with
Spain. They did not covet the Indian lands. They had never heard of the
Rocky Mountains--nobody had as yet,--they cared as little for the
Missouri as for the Congo, and they thought of the Pacific Slope as a
savage country, only to be reached by an ocean voyage longer than the
voyage to India. They believed that they were entitled, under the
treaty, to the country between the Alleghanies and the Great Lakes; but
they were quite content to see the Indians remain in actual occupancy,
and they had no desire to spend men and money in driving them out.
Nevertheless, they were even less disposed to proceed to extremities
against their own people, who in very fact were driving out the Indians;
and this was the only alternative, for in the end they had to side with
one or the other set of combatants.
The governmental authorities of the newly created Republic shared these
feelings. They felt no hunger for the Indian lands; they felt no desire
to stretch their boundaries and thereby add to their already heavy
burdens and responsibilities. They wished to do strict justice to the
Indians; the treaties they held with them were carried on with
scrupulous fairness and were honorably lived up to by the United States
officials.
The Government Especially Averse to War.
They strove to keep peace, and made many efforts to persuade the
frontiersmen to observe the Indian boundary lines, and not to intrude on
the territory in dispute; and they were quite unable to foresee the
rapidity of the nation's westward growth. Like the people of the eastern
seaboard, the men high in governmental authority were apt to look upon
the frontiersmen with feelings dangerously akin to dislike and
suspicion. Nor were these feelings wholly unjustifiable. The men who
settle in a new country, and begin subduing the wilderness, plunge back
into the very conditions from which the race has raised itself by the
slow toil of ages.
Inevitable Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.
The conditions cannot but tell upon them. Inevitably, and for more than
one lifetime--perhaps for several generations--they tend to retrograde,
instead of advancing. They drop away from the standard which highly
civilized nations have reached. As with harsh and dangerous labor they
bring the new land up towards the level of the old, they themselves
partly revert to their ancestral conditions; they sink back towards the
state of their ages-dead barbarian forefathers. Few observers can see
beyond this temporary retrogression into the future for which it is a
preparation. There is small cause for wonder in the fact that so many of
the leaders of Eastern thought looked with coldness upon the effort of
the Westerners to push north of the Ohio.
The Westerners Solved the Problem.
Yet it was these Western frontiersmen who were the real and vital
factors in the solution of the problems which so annoyed the British
Monarchy and the American Republic. They eagerly craved the Indian
lands; they would not be denied entrance to the thinly-peopled territory
wherein they intended to make homes for themselves and their children.
Rough, masterful, lawless, they were neither daunted by the prowess of
the red warriors whose wrath they braved, nor awed by the displeasure of
the Government whose solemn engagements they violated. The enormous
extent of the frontier dividing the white settler from the savage, and
the tangled inaccessibility of the country in which it everywhere lay,
rendered it as difficult for the national authorities to control the
frontiersmen as it was to chastise the Indians.
Why the East backed the West.
If the separation of interests between the thickly settled East and the
sparsely settled West had been complete it may be that the East would
have refused outright to support the West, in which case the advance
would have been very slow and halting. But the separation was not
complete. The frontiersmen were numerically important in some of the
States, as in Virginia, Georgia, and even Pennsylvania and New York; and
under a democratic system of government this meant that these States
were more or less responsive to their demands. It was greatly to the
interest of the frontiersmen that their demands should be gratified,
while other citizens had no very concrete concern in the matter one way
or the other. In addition to this, and even more important, was the fact
that there were large classes of the population everywhere who felt much
sense of identity with the frontiersmen, and sympathized with them. The
fathers or grandfathers of these peoples had themselves been
frontiersmen, and they were still under the influences of the traditions
which told of a constant march westward through the vast forests, and a
no less constant warfare with a hostile savagery. Moreover, in many of
the communities there were people whose kinsmen or friends had gone to
the border; and the welfare of these adventurers was a matter of more or
less interest to those who had stayed behind. Finally, and most
important of all, though the nation might be lukewarm originally, and
might wish to prevent the settlers from trespassing on the Indian lands
or entering into an Indian war, yet when the war had become of real
moment and when victory was doubtful, the national power was sure to be
used in favor of the hard-pressed pioneers.
The Government Ultimately supports the Frontiersmen.
At first the authorities at the national capital would blame the whites,
and try to temporize and make new treaties, or even threaten to drive
back the settlers with a strong hand; but when the ravages of the
Indians had become serious, when the bloody details were sent to homes
in every part of the Union by letter after letter from the border, when
the little newspapers began to publish accounts of the worst atrocities,
when the county lieutenants of the frontier counties were clamoring for
help, when the Congressmen from the frontier districts were appealing to
Congress, and the governors of the States whose frontiers were molested
were appealing to the President--then the feeling of race and national
kinship rose, and the Government no longer hesitated to support in every
way the hard-pressed wilderness vanguard of the American people.
The Situation in 1791.
The situation had reached this point by the year 1791. For seven years
the Federal authorities had been vainly endeavoring to make some final
settlement of the question by entering into treaties with the
Northwestern and Southwestern tribes. In the earlier treaties the
delegates from the Continental Congress asserted that the United States
were invested with the fee of all the land claimed by the Indians. In
the later treaties the Indian proprietorship of the lands was conceded.
[Footnote: American State Papers, Vol. IV., Indian Affairs, I., p. 13.
Letter of H. Knox, June 15, 1789. This is the lettering on the back of
the volume, and for convenience it will be used in referring to it.]
This concession at the time seemed important to the whites; but the
Indians probably never understood that there had been any change of
attitude; nor did it make any practical difference, for, whatever the
theory might be, the lands had eventually to be won, partly by whipping
the savages in fight, partly by making it better worth their while to
remain at peace than to go to war.
Knox and the Treaties.
The Federal officials under whose authority these treaties were made had
no idea of the complexity of the problem. In 1789 the Secretary of War,
the New Englander Knox, solemnly reported to the President that, if the
treaties were only observed and the Indians conciliated, they would
become attached to the United States, and the expense of managing them,
for the next half-century, would be only some fifteen thousand dollars a
year. [Footnote: American State Papers, Vol. IV., Indian Affairs, I., p.
13.] He probably represented, not unfairly, the ordinary Eastern view of
the matter. He had not the slightest idea of the rate at which the
settlements were increasing, though he expected that tracts of Indian
territory would from time to time be acquired. He made no allowance for
a growth so rapid that within the half-century six or eight populous
States were to stand within the Indian-owned wilderness of his day. He
utterly failed to grasp the central features of the situation, which
were that the settlers needed the land, and were bound to have it,
within a few years; and that the Indians would not give it up, under no
matter what treaty, without an appeal to arms.
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